11 November 2011

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a couple of weeks. It’s been busy and I thought it best to let the dust settle after the appointment process last week. That said, I’m hugely excited to have come through that process and have spent the last week or so working with my two fellow corporate directors – Sue and Carolyn - on our plans to take the organisation forward and to deliver for our elected members. We have agreed the new council structure with Cabinet and will be sharing this with ELT and the organisation from Monday.

We want to work in a different way. Rather than a departmental focus, we have identified a number of cross cutting themes which are important to our customers, communities and members. Our focus, and that of the service directors who make up ELT – the extended leadership team - will be to work across the organisation on these themes to ensure we deliver quickly. This will also enable us to embed the new values, behaviours and culture that many of you have been involved in developing over the last few months. More of this next week.

Today I shall be working with Sue and Carolyn on our operating model for the organisation and most importantly on the critical success factors for our first 90 days in our new roles. This is an important period for the organisation as we seek to capitalise on the new leadership arrangements in place and ensure we are on track to achieve our objectives.

This week’s full council meeting was a marathon ten hour session in the City Hall Salisbury. There were some very interesting subjects debated and it was good to see members of the public and business communities attending too.

For daily updates, opinion and all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand. 98 followers and counting... It’s a great way to keep in touch real time.

Talk again next week.

Carlton